Partner at Khosla Ventures
Check size: No personal check range is published. Khosla's Seed Fund supports technical and business-model experiments and may incubate companies; historical firm commentary described many seed investments around $1M–$2M. The Main Fund covers larger early and later rounds. These are firm-level references only.
Katie works at the company-formation boundary, incubating and backing early deep-tech and consumer ideas. Her experience spans satellites, AI research, consumer-company formation, entertainment partnerships, fundraising, recruiting, and product at Fei-Fei Li's Astrocade. That combination supports a thesis around technically novel products whose consumer behavior, narrative, team, and initial distribution can be designed together from day zero.
For an incubation, start with the impossible-but-testable premise, the founding insight, and why this team should be assembled now. Separate the largest technical risk from the largest consumer-behavior risk and propose cheap, fast tests for each. Show the first compelling experience, distribution wedge, cultural or strategic partnership advantage, and how the initial product can open a billion-dollar category.
Founders willing to begin with an unreasonable possibility, form the right team around it, and test the biggest technical or consumer-behavior risk quickly. Her operating history suggests value in product taste, cultural distribution, strategic partnerships, and the ability to recruit and ship before a category is obvious.
Khosla's seed criteria imply weak fit for copied consumer products, trend chasing without a distinctive behavior or technical edge, small markets, long plans without risk-reducing experiments, teams closed to debate, and founders looking only for money rather than help creating the company.
Co-design the founding insight, risk-removal plan, initial team, product wedge, and distribution advantage before organizational inertia fixes the wrong assumptions.
For a novel consumer technology, test technical feasibility and consumer behavior separately; a convincing prototype does not prove adoption, and demand does not remove engineering risk.
Identify the community, partner, creator, or behavior that can make an unfamiliar product legible and desirable, then test whether that wedge produces repeat use rather than launch attention alone.
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